HTML5 Table : Good Practices

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HTML5 Table is quite complex topic but in due course of time, we need to use a Table. Here is a guide for creating a well formed, SEO optimized, responsive Table. More you will know, more the Things get complex to realize closest to your expected result. As with HTML5 standard, we need to give importance to many aspects; including the practical fact – to date, none of the known Internet browsers fully support all of the features and codes in HTML5. Now, add the complexity Google Added or Testing including responsive Design, Tap size and position of a webpage etc. For Google, it is quite easy to declare anything as “should be like this” but for a single webmaster, the question of SEO-friendly becomes more complex to answer when we are thinking about website crawling and indexing.

Now, implementing Schema.org tags to HTML5 Table make it more difficult; wrong coding or mixing up various standards could lead to additional code bloat resulting in “spammy appearance” to Google for a hard worked meaningful list of data to human.

HTML5 Table : Case Study

If we do not take an example complex imaginary case, this article on HTML5 Table will be fully meaningless to the user – that is practically written all over the web – Google actually fail to understand; which article is more towards “perfect” (in terms of newer standards used by them) and which are not – other factors, unfortunately plays for SERP. The articles are not HTML5 Table itself but a webpage with lot of text.

Example Case :

A webmaster has a list of Drivers (that is the plurality of Driver) from which he wants to create a datatable with more than 100 rows for Windows Operating System (conditional to a single OS, multiple versions); written by several authors (that is plurality of Human) with outgoing links towards the vendor/OEM websites.

You can take an example Table like this to think :

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_operating_systems

The reader must clarify the following topics before reaching the next paragraph in this article :

Now, for a webpage, we need to check the references from Schema.Org. For our Case Study, the approach should be to create a Table of Things with reference Driver hyperlinked to another webpage within the same domain. On the second webpage, the particular Thing (one Driver) should be described and linked to the external vendor/OEM websites. This, as understandable, can keep the Things more organized. So, we first need to follow the standard of Collection Page (where the Table will be) :

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http://schema.org/CollectionPage

and for individual drivers, an ItemPage :

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http://schema.org/ItemPage

Other Elements like Authors, should be properly implemented.

HTML5 Table : The JavaScript Part

For keeping it simple, we are not going to describe the other ways to create a Table, for example with PHP and Javascript :